


Baseball and the Modern American Superhero

by sweetmel



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Baseball, Designated hitters, Gen, Steve Rogers and the 21st Century
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-19
Updated: 2015-02-19
Packaged: 2018-03-13 20:17:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3395018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sweetmel/pseuds/sweetmel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Wait,” Steve says, fork full of kimchi poised halfway to his mouth. “Are you telling me the pitchers don’t have to bat anymore?” </p><p>Because, really, the Dodgers in LA were only the beginning (aka Steve Rogers is a total nerd about baseball and we love him for it).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Baseball and the Modern American Superhero

**Author's Note:**

> “[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.” —A. Bartlett Giamatti
> 
>  
> 
> Not even sure what this is about, guys, except that Steve and I both have really strong feelings about designated hitters. 99.9% genfic, rating for language.

“Wait,” Steve says, fork full of kimchi poised halfway to his mouth. “Are you telling me the pitchers don’t have to bat anymore?” 

Clint looks sideways at Nat, who has raised her eyebrow in a You Should Have Expected This sort of way, which. No. No, Clint does not expect to have to field Steve’s intense feelings about designated hitters, of all fucking things.

“Not… usually?” Clint says, shrugging. “The National League doesn’t use designated hitters, but in interleague games hosted in AL stadiums—”

“What’s even the point?” Steve says, setting down his fork and setting his jaw. Nat is barely restraining herself from outright giggling, and Clint flicks her hard right where he left a bruise from last night’s sparring match. “The whole point is to be as well rounded as possible, and it’s not like any other players get to just decide not to hit, that’s part of the game!”

“I’m… sorry?” Clint offers up. Steve looks deeply unimpressed.

•••

“Do you just love losing?” Natasha asks, gleeful as Clint groans and buries his head in his hands. “Is that why you subject yourself to this again and again?”

Clint lets out a wordless howl and snatches the remote out of her hands, turning the TV off before the final score of Cubs–0, Braves–10, floats across the screen.

“Let the man mourn in peace, Natasha,” Steve says, sympathetic. “There’s something broken about Cubs fans anyways; that’s been true since 1935.”

Clint stops his cries of abject misery long enough to shoot Steve the evil-eye. Steve, the asshole, just grins back.

“At least my team has stayed put the whole damn time,” Clint says. “We didn’t abandon a city just because things got bad.”

Natasha’s eyes grow to the size of saucers. Steve’s Forehead Wrinkle of Justice appears, along with a scowl and an evil-eye of his own that makes Clint swallow dryly.

“If it were up to me,” Steve says in his Captain America Voice (and Clint is so fucked, damn it) “the Dodgers would have stayed in Brooklyn until Christ Jesus came back. They would have stayed there until the sun swallowed the earth. They would have stayed until the universe imploded in on itself. Unfortunately,” he puffs up as big as he can get while still on a couch in a shitty apartment in Red Hook, which, Clint admits hysterically, is pretty damn big, “I was a little bit preoccupied in 1957.”

The silence that follows is deafening as Steve stares angrily at Clint. Pizza dog lets out a huff and bops against Clint’s leg, probably to check if Clint is still breathing, and, ha, no, not going to do the breathing when Captain America just chewed you out about the Dodgers.

“You’re such an asshole, Rogers,” Natasha says with a barking laugh that dissolves into giggles. Steve finally cracks and grins at Natasha while Clint smells her drink to make sure she’s not drinking without him.

 

•••

 

The masses of people flowing into Nationals Park don’t pay any mind to one more tall white dude in a ball cap, even if he is built like a brick shithouse. A few screaming, overstimulated kids take a brief break from their tantrums to follow Steve’s face for a minute, a couple nodding solemnly when he puts a finger to his lips like a secret.

Steve climbs the stairs, holding himself back from taking them two at a time—they haven’t even sung the National Anthem yet, there’s no rush to make it to the bleachers for the opening pitch.

The hum of crickets, bugs and tree frogs cuts through the muggy night air and the sound of the crowds, and Steve is thankful yet again for his bigger, better lungs that don’t seize up in a fit of asthma during the the heat of the summer. He thinks about Bucky—a lot, but especially when he goes to night games, when the huge lights illuminate the field like it’s noon. Bucky would get a kick out of not having to miss work to see a game—a proper one, not one of the minor bush-leagues trying to get people to show up to their half-rate competitions where they were desperate for any warm body to fill the stands.

Steve’s seat is in the nosebleeds, and the area behind the stands is still pretty packed this high up. There’s way too many children running around partially supervised while their parents get tipsy on warm beer, too many people stopping in the middle of the walkway, but Steve doesn’t mind.Tony’s offered him box seats, season tickets behind home plate that have a cost that make Steve blanch even with two years adjustment to inflation under his belt. It’s impossible to explain why he needs being… in this, the mayhem and the noise, being one of a group of people who are all here for one thing.

The diamond is almost an eternity away, the warming-up players far below him. Steve shows his ticket to the attendant, who points to a seat a few rows up. He settles in, a few families and groups of young people scattered around him, but not a huge crowd in yet.

He pulls out his scorepad, pencil, and gets ready to watch the game.

 

•••

 

Sam knows that, despite his tendency to flip through all the channels on the TV and avoid the guide like the plague, Steve is a very modern man. He’s got the internet down, he knows how to turn SafeSearch on (and off, as Sam discovered one supremely awkward evening), and he texts.

It’s surprising to find Steve sitting in front of their dark television, reading on his tablet (probably something horribly depressing like NPR or, god, The Economist), and listening to a bona fide radio. Sam sets his grocery bags down and starts putting up the milk and eggs.

“The good guys winning?” Sam calls out, pulling a face when he remembers he forget to pick up some butter while he was out.

“3-4, bottom of the seventh,” Steve says, smiling. “LaRoche is up, and if he could just hit the damn ball, then we’d—”

“—score more points than the other guys, and win, yeah I know,” Sam teases. “We’ve talked about keeping your baseball nerd under control, you’re lucky I know what direction the hitters are supposed to run.”

Steve laughs and visibly restrains himself from launching into an explanation of the game. Again. Sam just rolls his eyes and starts stacking cans in the pantry. Baseball is the one thing Sam and Steve can’t talk about—besides basketball, of course, seeing as Steve is even more of a hopeless case about the sport than Sam is about baseball, which is saying something.

Sam’s settling into the recliner with his tablet for some mindless social media scrolling when the radio lets out a dull roar from a crowd and a man shouting above it all. Steve swears, sets aside his tablet, and picks up a small, spiral-bound flip-pad and pencil. His brow is furrowed as he makes notes about the latest ways that the Nationals have broken his heart.

“You have something against our beautiful, plasma-screen, better-picture-than-the-human eye StarkTV?” Sam asks.

Steve grins, smoothing out the Justice Wrinkle on his forehead. “If I want to watch a game, I’ll go to a game,” he says, turning the radio down as it blares an advertisement asking if you need a friend in the diiiiamond business? “There’s something obscene about watching it and not being there. Besides,” Steve says as he repositions his scorepad against his knee and picks up his tablet again, “the announcers on ESPN suck anyway. The vendetta they have against Strasburg is absolutely—”

“Whatever, man,” Sam grouses, “Sorry I asked,” and Steve lets out a genuine laugh.

 

•••

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I just have a lot of feelings about baseball, y'all. Also, if there's anyone I can forgive for being a Nationals fan, I guess it's Steve Rogers. 
> 
> TUNE IN AT SOME POINT FOR: Steve and the steroid era, Steve being really fucking obnoxious about baseball statistics, Steve and Bucky going to a baseball game, why Steve chose the Nats as his team, and Clint just generally being a fuck-up.
> 
> Come yell with me about our favorite pissy, passive-agressive dorito on [tumblr ](http://jubilee-pageant-master.tumblr.com/)


End file.
